


And there the grass grows soft and white

by Clocketpatch



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Family Feels, Gen, Hugs, Reunions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-20
Updated: 2018-01-20
Packaged: 2019-03-07 00:58:50
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,400
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13423350
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Clocketpatch/pseuds/Clocketpatch
Summary: The Doctor stood on the pavement outside the fence of Coal Hill School





	And there the grass grows soft and white

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Karios](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Karios/gifts).



The street was bright and dingy. The whole decade was, if the Doctor remembered correctly. Flowers and music. Protests and urban renewal. Bomb rubble being paved over. Improbably short skirts. People smoking wherever they pleased.

The Doctor stood on the pavement outside the fence of Coal Hill School, watching the students rushing out of the gate as they were let off class. They were talking about music and boys and whatever else it was teenagers talked about.

“What are you doing here?”

The Doctor felt a strong, not-quite-but-almost-human grip close on his sleeve. A short, but implacably loyal and annoyingly persistent presence at his side. The Doctor sighed. His absence had been noted.

“I could ask you the same question, Nardole. Who’s watching the vault?”

“I’ve got it on an app,” Nardole said, waving a phone that would continue to be a glaring anachronism for the next three centuries. “And I’ve got you on the app too, since we set the safety perimeters to track the biologicals particulars of our mutual friend if she ever decides to escape, and to track _you_ in case you ever decide to do anything so insanely foolish as bump into yourself.”

“I’m not here, Nardole,” the Doctor said. He didn’t mean it to come out so sharp and angry, even if he was raging inside. He was angry at himself, and at his past, and Nardole was nothing but a convenient, innocent target, making himself available by intruding on his privacy yet again. “I’ve already left. My bus was delayed; I missed her by a day.”

“Is that how you got here?” Nardole said, the Doctor’s anger rolling off of him like raindrops off a mechanical duck. “I’d wondered, with the TARDIS still in your office. A bus? Was it one of the nice ones with the seats that fold down? You know you made a lot of students very cross when they showed up for lecture and you weren't there.” Nardole paused as he finally finished processing the entirety of the Doctor’s sentence. “Her?”

The Doctor tensed. He kept his gaze forward, away from Nardole, on the gates that were closed now. “It doesn’t matter. We should go.”

“Can I help you?”

There was a woman coming towards them along the pavement. She wore a neat, professional dress and carried a book under her left arm. She was somewhere in late middle age, and everything about her screamed, _teacher_. She must have come out of a side gate.

“No, we were just leaving,” the Doctor said.

“Got to get back to our post, don’t we?” said Nardole, chipper as ever, clapping the Doctor on the back before offering a distraction. “Though maybe we can rent a car for you to drive, if you’d like? Instead of a bus?”

“That would be nice,” the Doctor said. “I don’t like bus stations.”

“Were you waiting for someone?” the woman asked as the Doctor and Nardole awkwardly tried to walk away and found themselves blocked by a man walking a bicycle. “Was it one of the students?”

“Something like that,” the Doctor said.

The woman was beside him and Nardole now. Her dress was dark blue. Her face had fine, almost elfin features. There were faint laugh lines bordering her mouth and eyes. Her dark hair was braided and coiled into a tight bun, but the Doctor, with his constant unconscious calculations of volume and speed and air pressure and movement, knew that it would fall past her waist if unbound.

 “Then why are you leaving?” she asked.

“Because she wasn’t here, and she never will be,” the Doctor said, calculating the traffic flow of the street and whether or not dodging delivery trucks and cabs was an acceptable escape risk. Something was beeping. Nardole was twitching and dancing from foot to foot like he needed to use the toilet. He had his anachronistic phone out again.

“Nardole, put that away,” the Doctor said.

“Uh…” Nardole said, looking from the screen to the woman to the screen. “I… we may need to be elsewhere very quickly.”

“I knew when you didn’t come back there had to be a reason,” the woman said. “And then I didn’t know where to find you – the universe is huge – but I knew that you’d have to bring Ian and Barbara back home eventually.”

Time slowed. The Doctor could hear the gears whirling in Nardole’s chest, the rustling feathers of a pigeon flying overhead, the rattle of the broken chain on the bicycle that had blocked their path. He could count the heartbeats, and he knew, and he didn't know why he hadn't known immediately. He'd been too concerned with running away to listen. The woman, and the curve of her chin and cheek which were so familiar now that he was actually looking at her. Her intense eyes, begging for a kind of belonging he could never properly give. How much older was she? He thought it was the same regeneration, but had her eyes always been blue? Time had washed his memories and taken the colour out of them.

“You’ve gone a bit funny, should I be concerned?” Nardole said, somewhere far away. “I can fight her off if I have to.”

“David helped me build the time capsule out of Dalek scrap,” the woman said. “It took us a while to test it. We kept bouncing against something in the vortex.”

 _David_. The Doctor had forgotten his name. He’d remembered that there was a human man she’d seemed to like or love or something – he hadn’t really understood that kind of connection then. He still didn’t, not entirely. He’d left her there, hoping for the best.

“We didn’t realize that we were in a bubble universe until we broke out of it,” the woman said. “We didn’t know about the War until it was over.”

She was forgiving him, the Doctor realized. She thought that the Time War had kept him away. That he’d tried to find her and found the post-Dalek occupation version of London he’d left her in swept away by a different history.

And she was right.

But there had been years and decades and centuries before that when he’d been meaning to visit and it had always gotten away from him. A good intention that faded to a nagging back-of-the-mind whisper.

And then it had been too late.

And then he’d tried to steal a glimpse, to look without touching, to take the photograph which he lacked, but the bus had broken down and he’d spent a night on a lumpy mattress in some middle of nowhere village. Too prideful, and too afraid of being (rightfully) reprimanded to call Nardole for help. So close, and so impossibly far away.

“It took me two years to get Ian and Barbara back, and I didn't deliver them in person,” the Doctor said. Whispered, because if he was too loud this fragile reprieve might startle and run away. He might startle and run away. "It's ironic, in a way. I sent them back in a bit of Dalek scrap as well."

“Oh Grandfather,” Susan said, dropping the book (a photo album, he realized, as the pages splayed open against the ground to reveal the black and white documentation of happy life led in another time, another place), and flinging her arms open to hug him – but then stopping, hesitating a finger's breadth away.

Nardole nudged the Doctor hard, breaking him out of the almost trace-like state he’d fallen into.

"Susan," the Doctor said, taking the needed step forward to complete the embrace, bending to rest his head on her much lower shoulder.

“Cuddle,” Nardole said quietly, taking a step back to give them their privacy.

“I missed you,” the Doctor said, blinking rapidly, as the years and regrets and excuses and anxieties melted away. He remembered a little girl, still chubby with baby fat, whose sticky fingers always smelled inexplicably of peppermint. The way she rolled and laughed on the chill grass and danced under the silver-seamed trees of a home neither of them could ever really return to. He remembered her older, but still a child, taking his hand with absolute trust and unshakeable belief before they both stepped forward into the unknown. And here they were again, balanced on the edge of a new beginning.

“I suppose, we have a lot to catch up on.”

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Title taken from _Where the Sidewalk Ends_ by Shel Silverstein


End file.
